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The Master of Mankind – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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One

The first murder
Thirst
Hunger

Two men cry out in a forgotten age. The roar of the slayer harmonises with the scream of the slain. In this earliest epoch, when humankind still fears spirits of fire and prays to false gods for the sun to rise, the murder of a brother is the darkest of deeds.

Blood marks the man’s face, just as it marks the spear in his clenched fists and the rocks beneath his brother’s body. The wound gouts and sprays – the man tastes the red wine of his brother’s veins, feeling the blood’s heat where it lands on his bearded skin, tasting of metals yet undiscovered and seas yet unseen. As the hot salt of spilt life burns his tongue, the man knows with impossible clarity:

He is the first.

Mankind – in all its myriad forms on the thousandfold path from wretched lizard-thing to warm-blooded mammal – has always fought to survive. Even as hunched ape-creatures and brutish proto-men, it waged insignificant and miserable wars upon itself with fists and teeth and rocks.

Yet this man is the first. Not the first to hate, nor even the first to kill. He is the first to take life in cold blood. He is the first to murder.

His dying brother’s thrashing hand reaches for him, raking dirty nails across his sweating skin. Seeking mercy or vengeance? The man doesn’t know, and in his rage he doesn’t care. He drives the wooden spear deeper into the yielding hardness of meat and against the scrape of bone. Still he screams, still he roars.

The scream of the first murderer cuts through the veil, echoing across reality and unreality alike.

To the things that wait in the warp, mankind will never sing a sweeter song.

Behind the veil, the scream takes a carnival of forms, riotous and infinite in variety. The frail laws of physics that so coldly govern the material universe have no power – here, those binding codes fracture into their separate fictions. Here, time itself goes to die.

On and on it plunges, crashing and dissolving and reforming in the endless storm. It ruptures a cloud-burst of other screams that haven’t yet been cried aloud. It punctures the fire-flesh of shrieking ghosts, adding to the torment of those lost and forsaken souls. It knifes through a disease that was rendered extinct by man-made cures twenty-six thousand years before.

And on. And on. And on. Clashing with moments that haven’t yet happened, that won’t happen for half an eternity. Grinding against events that took place back when the earliest Terran creatures exhaled water and – for the very first time – raked in lungfuls of air.

Behind the veil, there is no when and then. Everything is now. Always and eternally now, in the shifting tides of an infinite malignance.

Lights shine in that malignant black: the lights of sentience that draw the darkness closer. The same lights flare and shriek and dissolve at the merest touch from the forces around them. Dreams and memories take shape only to shatter amidst the claws and jaws manifesting within the nothingness.

The scream plunges on through every whisper of hatred that will ever be spoken by a human mouth or thought by a human mind. It cracks like lightning above the sky of a dying civilisation that will expire before ever grasping the wonder of space flight. It breaks the stone city-bones of a culture gone to dust thousands of years ago.

From its genesis in breath and sound the scream becomes acidic nothingness, then fury and fire. It becomes a memory that burns, a whisper that rends and a prophecy that bleeds.

And it becomes a name. A name that means nothing in any language spoken by any species, living or dead. A name that carries meaning only in the strangled, misfiring thoughts of humans breathing their last breaths, in that precious and terrifying moment when their spirits are caught between one realm and the next.

The name of a creature, a daemon born from the cold rage of one traitorous soul in one treacherous second. Its name is the deed itself, the first murder and the death rattle that followed.

In the creature’s shrieking journey across the warp, it touches the minds of every human who ever was and will ever be, from the long dead to those yet to be born. The daemon is tied to the species with such primal intimacy that every man, woman and child knows its caress – deep in their blood and bones – even if they know nothing of its name.

Billions of them stir in their sleep across the many ages of man, writhing against the unwanted touch of the creature’s birth back in the mists of time.

Millions of them wake, staring into the darkness of mud huts, palatial bedchambers, housing complexes and any one of the countless other structures that humans build for themselves across a million worlds and thousands of years.

One of them, a sleeper on Terra itself, wakes and reaches for a weapon.

Her hand slid along cool silk, inch by subtle inch, until she grasped the familiar ivory handle. Something mechanical was purring in her chamber, a droning song in the shadows.

‘Do not draw the weapon,’ said the voice of her killer. ‘You are said to be an intelligent woman, Minister Zu. I had hoped we might avoid such futility.’

The minister swallowed with a click in her throat. She didn’t release the pistol grip. Her hand felt glued to it by sudden night sweat.

How could he be here? What of her guards? A palace’s worth of warriors waited below, armed to the teeth and paid far beyond the threat of her rivals’ crude bribery. Where were they? And what of her family?

Where are the gods-cursed alarms?

‘Rise, minister.’ The voice was too low, too resonant, to be human, nor did it convey anything in the way of human emotion. If statues could speak, they would speak with this assassin’s voice. ‘You know that if I am here, you are already dead. Nothing will change that now.’

She sat up slowly, though she refused to slacken her grip on the gun. ‘Listen,’ she said to the golden shape in the darkness.

‘Negotiation is equally futile,’ the killer assured her.

‘But–’

‘As is begging.’

That set off a spark within her. She felt her features harden as her temper ignited her courage. ‘I wasn’t going to beg,’ she said, her voice cold.

‘My apologies then.’ The figure made no move.

‘What of my guards?’

‘You know what I am, Koja Zu. You can choose to die alone, or you can resist the inevitable and I will leave this palace only after killing everyone who resides within it.’

My son. The thought welled up, bleeding and hot and savage.

‘My son.’ She said the words aloud before she could help herself.

‘He is of an age to serve the Emperor.’

Koja Zu’s hand trembled as it gripped the gun.

‘No,’ she said, and how she loathed herself for the shake in her voice. ‘He’s only four. Please, no. Not the Legions.’

‘He is too young for the Legions. There are other fates, minister.’

Her eyes were adjusting even as her blood ran cold. In the half-light of the hours before dawn she could make out the ornate, overlapping edges of his burnished armour. The suit of golden plate emitted a low thrum, the source of the mechanical purr. In his hands was a long spear, lowered to aim at her. Affixed above the weapon’s arm-length blade was the bulky chassis of a boltgun, clad in reinforced wirework.

None of this surprised her. What surprised her was that the killer stood unhelmed, showing a face that had once been human.

‘I’ve never seen one of you like this,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t even sure you had faces.’

‘Now you know otherwise.’

Koja Zu watched as the assassin tilted his head slightly, hearing the whisper of priceless mechanics in the collar of his golden armour. Though his towering form was scaled-up by whatever genetic meddling his master had performed to enhance the brute’s intellect and physicality, no gene-weaving could hide his roots. He had been human, once. An Albian heritage, perhaps, going by his features beneath the weathered flesh and battle scars.

‘May I at least know the name of my killer?’

He hesitated, and she dared to believe she’d caught him with an unexpected question. Yet his dark eyes never wavered.

‘My name is Constantin Valdor.’

‘Constantin,’ she repeated slowly. Her schooling in Old Earth’s mythology had been extensive, and she often hearkened back to old tales and legends in her speeches. All the better to inspire the teeming masses of godless, hopeless dregs who served her. Now the minister found herself smiling, no matter that her son was to be stolen away to a fate of genetic torment; no matter that her own death was mere breaths away. She smiled a madwoman’s smile, all teeth and wide eyes. ‘I am to be killed by a man with an ancient king’s name.’

‘So it seems. If you have any last words, I will ensure they reach the Emperor’s ears.’

Koja Zu’s lip curled. ‘Emperor. How I loathe that title.’

‘He is the ruler of this world and the master of our species. No title is more appropriate.’

She bared her teeth in an expression too ugly and defiant to be a smile. ‘Have you ever considered just what kind of creature you serve?’

‘Yes.’ The dark eyes stared on. ‘Have you?’

‘The “Master of Mankind”.’ She shook her head, feeling the welcome flare of righteousness. ‘He isn’t even human.’

‘Minister Zu.’ The golden warrior made a warning of her name. One she didn’t heed.

‘Does He even breathe?’ she demanded. ‘Tell me that, Custodian. Have you ever heard Him breathe? He is a relic left over from the Dark Age. A weapon left out of its box, now running rampant.’

Valdor blinked once. The first time she’d seen him blink so far. That rare human movement was unnerving – to her it felt false, like it had no right taking place upon his statuesque features.

‘Terra,’ he said, ‘is a thirsty world.’

She knew, then. With those words, she knew which of her many crimes she was to die for. The one she’d least expected.

A laugh, queasy and unwanted, tore itself from her throat. ‘Oh, you vile slave,’ she said, unable to keep the sick grin from her face.

‘Other worlds suffer a similar thirst.’ The golden killer’s eyes had glassed over with an inhuman serenity made all the more uncomfortable by the living intelligence shining behind it. ‘Yet none of them hold the war-scarred, irradiated honour of being mankind’s cradle. This world is the beating heart of the Great Crusade, minister. Do you know how many men, women and children now make their slow way back here – to humanity’s first home? Do you know how many pilgrims wish only to see the ancestral Earth with their own eyes? How many refugees flee their flawed and failing worlds now the veil of Old Night has been lifted? Already it is said that unsettled land on the Throneworld is the most valuable commodity in our nascent Imperium. But this is not so, is it? One resource is far more precious.’

She clutched the autopistol tighter as he spoke, breathing slowly and calmly. Even knowing she was to die, even knowing she had no hope of drawing the weapon, the body was reluctant to surrender its survival instincts. Instinct demanded she fight to live.

‘What I did,’ she said, ‘I did for my people.’

‘And now you will die for what you did for them,’ he said without malice.

‘For that alone?’

‘For that alone. Your other treacheries are meaningless in my master’s eyes. Your cleansing pogroms. Your trade in forbidden flesh. The army of gene-worked detritus you have sequestered in the bunkers beneath the Jermanic Steppes. The prospect of your rebellion was never a threat to the Pax Imperialis. Your crimes of apostasy are nothing. You are dying for the sin of your harvester machines drinking the Last Ocean.’

‘For stealing water?’ She felt like laughing again, and the sensation wasn’t a pleasant one. The laughter was creeping up through her blood, seeking a release. ‘All of this… because I stole water?’

‘It pleases me that you understand the situation, Minister Zu.’ He inclined his head once more, with a curious courtesy and another subtle purr of machine-muscles. ‘Goodbye.’

‘Wait. What of my son? What is his fate?’

‘He will be armed with silver, armoured in gold and burdened by the weight of ultimate expectation.’

Zu swallowed, feeling her skin crawl anew. ‘Will he live?’

The golden statue nodded. ‘If he is strong.’

In that moment, her trembles subsided. The fear bled away, leaving only naked defiance somewhere between relief and hope. She closed her eyes.

‘Then he will live,’ she said.

There was a bang, throaty and concussive, and she was falling, drowning, choking in thunder. There was pressure and heat and grey, grey, grey. And then mercifully there was nothing.

Nothing, at least, for her.

The creature formed from the twinned screams of the first murder clawed its shrieking way free from the womb of the warp. It dragged itself through a wound in the universe, breaching reality with all the exertion expected of a being forcing its own birth. Once away from the nurturing tides of the Sea of Souls, its flesh steamed and shivered. Reality immediately began to eat its corpus, gnawing at the beast that should not exist.

It rose, stretched out its limbs and senses, and shook off the slick, wet fire of its genesis.

It hungered.

It hunted.

True to its nature, it hunted alone in the cold of this sunless realm, ignoring the jealous, wrathful and fearful cries of its lesser kin. It had no capacity for kinship even with those monsters that shared similar births, considering them – insofar as it had the intelligence to form any thoughts at all – as lesser reflections of its primacy. Their existences, and the weaknesses they suffered, were nothing and less than nothing.

Had any Imperial scholar managed to pry open the daemon’s skull, and were there a brain within to dissect for answers, the creature’s mind would have been laid bare as a node of punishingly sensitive perceptions. An animal might hunt by a prey’s movement or the smell of its blood, but the daemon didn’t comprehend such miserable trails of scent and sight and sound. It hunted not by the crude mechanisms of its prey’s bodies, but by the very light of their souls.

The monster moved unseen through the great tunnels and chambers, its tread spreading corrosion through the arcane material that made up this unnatural realm. It clutched no weapon. If it needed a blade or a bludgeon, it would fashion one from its own essence, using them to break open the brittle shells of its victims and feast on the life within. More likely it would rely on its strength, its talons and its jaws. These would suffice for all but the toughest prey. They had survived when the creature had incarnated itself in the past for other hunts on other worlds.

It crawled along the shattered walls of the expansive tunnel, reaching out with its impossible perceptions. The daemon listened to the song of souls nearby, the chorus of human emotion beckoning like a siren call. The Anathema was somewhere in this realm, as were its childlings, the Golden. The daemon would find them, and rend them apart with weapons shaped from its hating heart.

The boiling oil of the creature’s thoughts locked on to the promise of prey. Instinct dragged the daemon west.

On it crawled, sometimes moving through tunnels so large they defied the daemon’s senses, seemingly great empty expanses of nothingness. It stalked through the knee-deep golden mist that pervaded so much of this realm, and it shifted as it moved, its flesh rippling and solidifying, crusting over in scales of burnished metal.

Pinpricks of life needled against its senses. The creature slowed, halted, turned. Saliva, hot as magma, dripped from between its bared teeth.

It launched forwards, shadow-silent, faster than the eye could follow.

A boundary servitor sensed the creature’s approach. AL-141-0-
CVI-55-(0023) was a tech-slave, a woman who for fifteen years had been answering to a numerical signifier in place of the name she no longer remembered. She’d earned her sentence through the murder of a forge overseer during a food riot. Now she turned what was left of her head towards the scanner anomaly.

‘Tracking,’ AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) said aloud.

That one word began an awakening among the other servitors nearby. They stalked closer with the pathetic grace of the half-dead wretches they were. Immense weapons rose. Clouded eyes squinted through targeting lenses. Razor-thin tracer beams lanced out from cannon muzzles and targeting arrays.

As rudimentary as they were, the servitors were primed for sentry duty. They were aware that many of their number, once linked to the shared vox-grid, had fallen silent. They knew, in their own simple way, that their kin were being killed.

In a different breed of ignorance, the daemon didn’t know what a servitor was. It knew nothing of the lobotomising process that scraped a criminal’s brain free of deeper cognition, or the grafting of crude mono-tasked logic engines in place of a reasoning mind. It knew only what it sensed, which was that the diminished souls in this hunting ground were just alive enough to bleed, and the running of blood was all that mattered.

It drew closer. Their clockwork-simple machine thoughts whispered against its essence. It tasted the warp-scent of their weapons – not the fyceline primer or the vibrating magnetic coils, but the weapons themselves. Instruments of destruction with their own spiritual reflections. They were caresses of pressure prickling at the monster’s mind. The daemon sensed anything that had shed blood or taken life. A creature of murder knew its own kind, whether it was formed of aetheric ichor, mortal flesh or sanctified metal.

‘Tracking,’ said AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) again. Three of the others repeated the word, slightly out of sync. Her head snapped this way and that on an augmented spinal column, seeking, hunting. Prickles of sensory data buzzed at the sides of her slow consciousness. It was enough. ‘Engaging,’ she voiced.

‘Engaging,’ the other three repeated, still out of time, as the sensors in their skulls registered the approaching creature a moment later.

AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) devoted her stunted brain processes to two subroutines. The first was to pulse a three-beat signal of white noise across an unclosable vox-link, notifying her handler of her heightened state of alertness. The second was to brace her bionic foot against the unseen surface of the tunnel’s floor. The immense heavy bolter that replaced her right arm clunked twice, weighty with purpose. An ammunition feed rattled from the weapon’s body to where it connected to her bulky backpack.

The daemon – still nothing more than a nebulous threat throbbing at the edge of her sensory input feeds – ghosted through the shattered buildings thirty-two degrees to the left. The servitor pivoted with a snarling melody of mechanical joints and opened fire with her heavy bolter. It bellowed its roaring staccato, shaking her entire body with the force of a seizure. After a second and a half the crude recoil compensators fused to her muscles and bones kicked in to keep the weapon aimed true. The cracked fragments of her teeth had already crashed together with enough force to start her gums bleeding. She felt no pain from this. The nerves in her gums had been stripped away to immunise her from that very reaction.

The other servitors followed her lead, bracing their feet and opening up with their own salvos of explosive bolts. None of the four units registered the impacts of accurate fire. Each of them recorded their misses in the simplified data engines at the cores of their skulls.

When their weapons cycled down with the target lost, the total number of successful hits tallied at zero.

‘Committing to scout-predation subroutine,’ AL-141-0-CVI-55-
(0023) vocalised. She walked ahead, her auspex vista narrowed and focused in search of the surely wounded foe. Even her blunted brain could process the anomaly at play. Her targeting computations suggested the creature should ha, ve been struck by between twenty-nine and forty-four .998 calibre shells. It should no longer be moving at all, let alone moving swiftly enough to ghost away into hiding again. AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) vox blurted this anomalous detail to her handler.

She never acknowledged the reply. The daemon propelled itself from somewhere beyond the detection of her sensory array with a single contortion of its unnatural muscles, burying a claw-spear of ichorous cartilage into her torso, destroying every mono-programmed engine acting in place of her removed organs and annihilating her sole biological lung, which had miraculously survived unaugmented for over a decade.

‘Enemy sighted,’ the servitor tried to say. Blood and chips of broken teeth left her lips instead, gouting across the taloned arm that had killed her. The claw-spear lashed back from her body with a whip-crack of abused meat. The servitor fell to the ground in several wet, suffering pieces.

‘Enemy sighted,’ the largest of her component pieces tried to say once more. Her torturously primitive thought processes couldn’t fathom why her primary weapon wasn’t firing. She lacked the capacity for diagnostic function and her nervous system had been chemically rethreaded after her sentencing, so she had no idea that she had been torn asunder.

Bolters roared, utterly silent to the daemon, whose senses knew nothing of sound. The beast lunged three more times, jaws grinding shut on flesh spiced with artificial oil, claws lancing through brittle armour plating to the softer tissue beneath.

The blood that ran was impure and unsuited to beat through a human heart, corrupted by the nature of the cyborging procedure, but these impurities were irrelevant to the creature. It savoured the sensation of murder, wearing different skins and shapes until it adopted a form capable of crouching over and nuzzling at the streams of blood snaking their way across the mist-shrouded ground.

Two of the downed servitors protested voicelessly and limblessly, straining to go about their duties unto their dying breaths. On the ground, half lost in the low mist, the dismembered torso and head of the lead servitor miraculously survived – in no small amount of agony – for almost two minutes. The only thing she could sense beyond the pain of her damaged mechanical organs failing to sustain her was the proximity of the entity that had destroyed her.

‘Enemy sighted,’ she tried to warn her handler across the vox, though without functioning lungs or most of her throat she was unable to make any sound at all. The last thing she heard, recorded by her fading cognition core, was her killer feasting on the remains of her counterparts.

The beast, ruled by its illogical and depthless hunger, spread its great wings with aching crackles of ragged sinew. The blood of the slain servitors was saturated with chemicals, tasting grey upon the tongue and failing to hold the creature’s interest. Hunger was pulling at the threads of the creature’s form.

Far from satisfied, it ached to devour stronger souls and fresher blood than that of these false, reforged humans. Driven by murder-lust and blood-need, the daemon born of the first murder turned its array of inhuman perceptions towards a dead city that had, in recent years, been claimed by new invaders.

Sometimes it mattered very much from whence the blood flowed.

Click here to buy The Master of Mankind.

For Savannah Lily Dembski-Bowden, who decorated my shoulder with vile,
milky baby vomit only five minutes before I wrote these words. Thanks, Scout.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2016
This eBook edition published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover artwork by Neil Roberts.
Internal illustrations by Kevin Chin.

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ISBN: 978-1-78572-086-4

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